And Tyler made a good fist of making that happen. By the time Mike and I returned with drinks and toast to keep us going till the inevitably late Christmas dinner we were going to be having, given Riley’s breakfast club, he’d wellied into most of the presents we’d allowed him to open without us with great excitement and gay abandon – we’d been able to hear his whoops of joy from the kitchen.
But that was all we heard. Though she was sitting passively and politely on the rug, having by now systematically piled her presents at her side, Bella seemed wedded to the idea of children being seen and not heard; at best she nodded in response to Tyler, offering no more communication than the odd ghost of a smile.
Tyler, for his part, carried gamely on. He seemed to have decided that he’d just fill the conversational gaps with yet more words and, in the absence of any other strategy, we took his lead, treating Bella almost – though without any lack of respect – like an amiable family dog, from whom we didn’t actually expect any response.
We decided the best thing would be if I, and I alone, popped round to Riley’s for an hour, on the basis that it was David’s mum and I who’d be the most closely involved in the wedding preparations, discussion of which was the main reason for going round. It would also give me a chance to prepare the ground before they all descended on us – and Bella – at dinner-time, so that they understood that it would, of necessity, be a different kind of Christmas Day. It would also give me a chance to fill in Kieron and Lauren – also scheduled to come to us for Christmas dinner later.
I’d wavered a bit – another reason for my largely sleepless night – reasoning that one alternative would be to cancel the day altogether, for fear it might make Bella’s emotional state even worse. It wasn’t the first time we’d had a child in over Christmas and I doubted it would be the last, because Christmases are times of great stress and a key time for family breakdowns, but every situation was different, as was every child. Had things been less on a knife-edge – you didn’t get more knife-edge than Dad in ITU and Mum in jail for trying to kill him, I reckoned – it would have been less difficult a decision, and had Bella been younger (say five or six) it would have been a completely different story; younger children, in my experience, were better able to distract themselves from the enormity of the life-change they were experiencing, as they were more able to ‘park’ it and make believe they were just off on some sort of holiday.
But would cancelling Christmas really help Bella anyway? Yes, she was clearly old enough to feel terrified about how her future was unravelling, but perhaps that meant she needed distraction even more.
There was also my own family to consider. And to cancel things would be to create a logistical nightmare, not least because I was the one with the turkey and all the trimmings, and to try and rejig and/or relocate the whole shebang would cause even more upheaval, not least because of the many comings and goings that it would require.
No, on balance, we agreed, we should probably press on with the day – envelope our frightened visitor in festive love and laughter, but with the safe haven of her bedroom, should she need it. She didn’t strike me as a child who wanted to be the centre of attention, which the alternative scenario meant she would be.
And it was Bella herself who finally ticked the mental box. In the fact that, the presents opened (bar her own from her family, as yet) and the toast and hot chocolate dispatched, she seemed happy enough to curl up at one end of the sofa and settle down to watch a Harry Potter film with Tyler – and with her cherished soft toy – not a gremlin, but a ‘Dobby the house-elf’, according to Tyler – and the rabbit we’d got for her, which pleased me greatly. Indeed, I had much to thank J. K. Rowling for that morning, because it was a shared devotion to the young wizard that forged their first, tentative bond, and, in response to his ‘Wicked! The Deathly Hallows is on. You want to watch it?’ elicited her first proper words since she’d come to us, which were ‘Yes, please.’
But which also caused me to wonder, as I drove the short distance to Riley’s house, what kind of mutism we were actually dealing with here. My experience wasn’t extensive – I’d only worked closely with one child who displayed similar systems, truth be told – but in doing so, I’d read up on different forms of mutism, and instinct told me this was more a conscious choice on Bella’s part than anything else. This certainly didn’t seem to fit the profile of other forms I’d come across, where the child struggled to overcome what was often a physiological as well as a psychological barrier, often unconscious. No, it was more that Bella had made a very conscious decision not to engage.
All very intriguing, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that it was almost certainly because Bella had witnessed that attempted murder by her mother and was shutting down to avoid incriminating her further, during the endless questions she’d have doubtless already been asked in its aftermath.
Even so, there was a difference between refusing to discuss that, and making a blanket decision not to speak to anyone at all.
Riley, now a respite foster carer herself, agreed. ‘Though let me be the first to suggest one minor change in tonight’s entertainment,’ she commanded. ‘That the karaoke machine remains unplugged.’ Which suggestion was naturally passed unanimously.
‘Seriously,’ she added, ‘I think you’re right to stick with the plan, Mum, and I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to give up my Christmas dinner.’ (‘Oh, yes, you are,’ came the rousing chorus from around the table.) ‘I reckon she can distract herself better in a big crowd of kids than if she’s got everyone’s attention on her in a silent empty house. Didn’t you just say that was why things weren’t working out in the last foster place she was at? I know that’s how I’d feel, anyway. Specially given that every adult she’s had anything to do with up till now has probably been trying to get her to talk about what happened. I wonder what did happen …’ she mused. ‘Do you reckon her mother was trying to kill him?’
It was obviously impossible to answer that question till one of two things happened – either Bella’s father recovered sufficiently to recount the facts as he remembered (as best he could, given that one fact we did know was that he was extremely drunk when admitted to A&E), or Bella herself decided to. As things stood, her mum was pleading hitting him in self-defence, and until her partner’s situation resolved itself – either he recovered or he died – there was nothing to be done. I wondered if Bella herself was almost in a state of mental breath-holding. I wondered how she felt about her dad’s possible death. How she felt about her dad.
I didn’t stay long at Riley’s – really only long enough to talk wedding to-do lists with David’s mum. And, once I was back home, knowing the entire family were going to be with us in a scant three or four hours – not to mention our first foster child, Justin, now a strapping adult, with an appetite to match – I took advantage of Bella’s apparent desire to stay on the sofa in her pyjamas to properly attack all the food preparation. Every time I checked on her, she was either watching TV with Tyler, or had her nose in a Harry Potter book; it seemed he’d brought down the entire collection from his bedroom, and that though she’d told him she’d read them all – some of them twice (positively chatty now, at least with Ty!) – she’d be more than happy to read them all again.
But if that had been Bella’s escape plan (and a book was always an excellent escape plan) the combined onslaught of attention from my quartet of noisy grandchildren proved too powerful a force to avoid. Very soon, though still largely silent and wary around the adults, she was immersed in their world of make-believe and dolls and Lego, and though she still didn’t speak much she was at least fully engaged – well, again, as far as I could tell.
I sat her next to Levi for our Christmas dinner, since, my eldest grandchild being ten now, they were closest in age, but it was soon clear that the closest bond she was likely to forge was with Marley Mae. From the outset, Bella had been my granddaughter’s main topic of interest, and was fast becoming her little shadow.
‘I think it’s because she can’t ask her anything she doesn’t want to answer,’ I told Lauren, my Kieron’s other half, while we stacked and